Ownership of Telecommunications Infrastructure and Internet Shutdowns in Times of Political Contestation

For many, the Internet looks like a place where anyone can create and share information, and where these data make their way seamlessly from one user to another. Yet, access to the Internet is structured by a number of choke points, notably Internet Service Providers (ISPs) that are often in the hands of private companies, such as MTN, Orange, or Vodafone. The existence of these central servers may make it trivial for authoritarian leaders to censor, spy on, or shut down the Internet – provided that whoever owns them is willing to comply with their request. In this paper, we determine the effect of different types of ISP ownership (state/private; foreign/domestic; etc) on chances for internet shutdowns at moments of political contestation, notably elections and protests. In developing our argument, we mainly draw on prominent agency-centred theories in international business studies. We explore the link between infrastructure ownership and internet shutdowns in times of political contestation using traffic data from the censorship circumvention tool Psiphon as well as our unique data of ownership structures and identities of telecommunication companies in the transforming context of African countries from 2000 to 2016. Overall, this contribution seeks to build a bridge between political science scholarship and the more technical literature borrowing from engineering and computer science, on the one hand, and international business studies and research on corporate governance in developing authoritarian contexts, on the other.